Credits

All power comes from the people: This message is the foundation of modern, representative democracy. Since the 18th century, it has been globally embraced, as a utopian dream, as a promise, and often enough as an empty phrase. Parliament buildings are both instruments and monuments of this idea: inside they are places of debate; on the outside, they represent the power of nations.

This wiki was developed as part of the exhibition “Plenum - Places of Power” in the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2014. It documents information on 196 national parliament buildings worldwide accompanied by basic information on each country’s economy and political system.

In the exhibition, each national parliament was presented as a 1:500 scale model. For the wiki, we have grouped the parliaments according to different sets of criteria listed below. For a graphical overview please refer to the gallery of all parliaments. For finding an individual parliament, please use the alphabetical list or the search field in the header.

We hope that this wiki will be a starting point for further research during the course of the exhibition and beyond. We encourage contributions concerning the building data, references to publications or websites and additional images.